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Asri-unix.1191 net.works utzoo!decvax!cca!sri-unix!ROSSID@Wharton-10 Thu Apr 8 16:33:52 1982 Power of a workstation From: ROSSID at Wharton-10 (David Rossien) The MIP as a unit of workstation functionality is about as useful a measurement as horsepower is for the space shuttle... great for the media to make people oooh and ahhh, but otherwise useless. When a shuttle is put together people don't want to know about horsepower, they want to know whether the damn thing is gonna fly; and that is a function of its weight, payload, pull of gravity, wind velocity, and... the pilot. I was up in White Plains at Big Blue not long ago, and the district sales manager told managers of my department that "the IBM Displaywriter has the power of a 370/135." Great, I exclaimed... I want to run TEL-A-GRAF, IFPS, APL, and IMS (those being some of the packages/languages we use). The manager looked sheepish "you can't do that" he said. But I could on a 370... Well, it turns out he was talking MIPS, and lemme tell you, when it comes to word processing (which is what the furshluginer thing was MADE for, ) it is slower than a half a dozen word processors which use Z80s as CPUs. For all the talk of power, we decided the machine was agonizingly slow!

Butler Lampson, an Alto designer, told us in class that the Star was one of the fastest machines around... Maybe so, but it is too slow to use in a production word processing operation. (We haven't spoken about the Star's speed that I remember... DON'T ASK FOR "HELP" it literally takes 30 minutes to get the files from the file server and load them all in!!! Oh, and the Stars you see at NCCs and INFOs are generally souped up with extended memory so as not to run embarassingly slow. I was told that Xerox first expected to sell the Stars with 192K, but they ran SO slowly they now use a minimum of 256K.

The point to all this is, don't give me how many MIPS, let me tell you what I want to do, and then tell me what my response time will be ... since it depends on how its implemented, you will have to implement what I want and let me fiddle... which all comes back to the point I made before... all the math (and MIPS) in the world isn't worth one case of "try it and see."

-Dave

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